Sheila Scratches

The only time she walks with a spring in her step is when she’s got cards in her hand. She’s sitting down now, at Sainsbury’s complimentary cafeteria. She’s bought the shopping and a Daily Mail.
Now she’s scratching.
She’s got a score’s worth but you wouldn’t know it by the speed she's scratching.
Once she’s done, she looks around with a mixture of sheepishness and indignation to see if any one can read her pain, her hurt.
She drinks her coffee, flicks through her Mail and picks at the egg and cress sandwich that's been coupled with the Royal burning away at her oranged hand for the last two minutes.
She sees an article about tigers in China, where, in a Disney-style theme-park, they sell tiger meat salads for £35. The staff are told to say it is lion meat if the person asking might be a western journalist. Sheila wants to throw up, but she holds it down and thinks of something else.
Now she’s off to the Post Office to cash her giro in. Here, she buys twelve scratchcards and races off home.
Dropping the shopping at the door, she rifles through her purse to find the key.
This is an all too familiar home-run for Sheila. She’s itching for a scratch. She can’t wait another minute.
Running into the kitchen, she sits down at her lucky chair; the one covered in snot and tears from years of losing.
Once she’s finished scratching, she places the lucky two-pence piece back into the darkness of her Chinese patent-leather purse, strolls over to the front-door to get the shopping, returns to the kitchen, switches on the kettle, despatches the load to its compartments and then, finally, as if she’d been waiting for this one moment, Sheila punches her losing wall three times. There, she administers cuts to her knuckles (middle and index).
After she’s made a nice cup of tea, she slumps off to the bathroom, puts the water on, brushes her teeth and tongue, right to the yellowy barnacles at the back of her sandpaper throat, undresses, gets into the bath and has a good old scratch at an armpit with her still bloodied hand.
Once she’s scratched her armpit sufficiently, she relaxes for a while, melting away in the hot water, thinking about all her lost boyfriends, trying to conjure up a meaningful wank with the sound of the hot-water tap still trickling.
Failing that, she worries why her memory of past lovers has faded so much in the last few years, and resigns herself to picking away at an awkward piece of snot in her cavernous left nostril.
A long strand of snot comes away and, as it springs on to her finger, it reminds her of the unwanted bit in a cooked egg that sticks to the yoke, but still she eats it with venom and washes it down with tea.
A five minute scratch to her inner thigh is administered.
Once she’s cleaned up the drips of blood in the kitchen and bathroom, she ambles off to the local Gamblers Anonymous meeting at the Quaker House in Peddler’s Row, where she sighs every fifteen seconds.
You can see in her eyes that she’s not there to follow the Twelve Steps. Sheila wants a man to take her away from herself, from her own personal hell, but she’s already worked her way through this lot and they really don’t want anything to do with her.
She sits, she smokes, she listens and hopes she won’t judge (or laugh at) the man with neck cancer who’s ranting on about the days of nudgematic fruit-machines, and then she drifts off and suddenly realises she’s judging the arse off him, so she excuses herself, gets a cup of tea and waits on the steps of the Quaker House to see if any one might join her.
The meeting ends and the dozen or so addicts leave, but no one even notices her as she sits there. She’s cranking her neck up every five seconds wearing a stretched smile to see who’s leaving, but not one says hello or goodbye to her.
On the way home, only one thing matters.
How can she get past the corner shop without going in there and getting a handful of scratchcards?
As she turns the corner at Anstell Road, her walking speed picks up. She can’t see herself, but all she’s doing is playing with her addiction now. The game’s up, but only the wise know.
Now on Denzil Road, she can see her own flat up in the distance. Sheila stops and scratches her head for a while.
It’s so close, but there’s the corner shop, just down Stennent Avenue. As she crosses the T-junction that is Denzil and Stennent, she stops at the post box and rummages through her bag pretending that she might have mail to send, so close to the edge of a scratchcard, wondering how long an eternity it would be before she actually went towards one destination or another.
Finally, after thrashing out the pros and cons in bullet-points, she looks over to the corner shop as if she needs something practical and races down there. What joyous fever enters her as she strides without fear towards her heaven! Now she hears the faintest bird singing in the trees! Nothing can stop her. She is driven by her own powerlessness, completely at ease with the world once more.
‘Fiver’s worth of Lucky Stripes, three Red Hots and a couple of Lady Lucks, please,’ she says, gasping with joy. The thirteen-year old Indian boy, perched on the highchair behind the counter, despatches them without looking up and then sneezes spasmodically over his Gameboy. His mother screams at him in another language but he seems indifferent.
Once she’s finished scratching, alone in the kitchen, she sits up and looks to see how her knuckles are doing. They look like a pair of drunk eyes in her hand. She feels better once she guides her lighter over her forearm, just in case any new hair has crept up since she last burnt them all off. No such luck.
Following beans on toast with grated cheese, she indulges in a bit of Heartbeat with a brick of chocolate and thuds off to bed.
In the morning, once she’s stirred, she looks up at the ceiling and decides to scratch her left inner-thigh.
After treating the inner-thigh, she sniffs and rubs her nose.
A fart exerts itself into the bedding without ceremony. She wafts it a few times, lift and sniff, lift and sniff, and Sheila savours the moments.
The odious quality wears off quickly.
She stares longingly at the ceiling, wishing it to come down like a vice and bury her, but it doesn’t, so she waits for something to tempt her out of bed.
The index-finger on her right hand twitches.
‘There it goes again,’ she whispers to herself, well aware of this particular twitch’s significance.
With one last gasp at the tail-end of the fart, the thought of a good old scratch raises her from the bed and into the kitchen.
Standing over the sink, she feels through her hair.
‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘Forgot to wash it again.’
There was no time for that now. Sheila got dressed and hid her mop under a raincoat.
Her lucky shop, where she’d acquired the £250 scratchcard back in 1997, lies just on the other side of Kensal Rise. Sheila uses this as her scratchcard pilgrimage, her odyssey, in times of woe.
It’s a sad attempt to bring back that winning streak, but she remembers with pride and longs to relive the joy.
She passes by two well-to-do young ladies. They sman and she looks around but they swoop into a beauty salon before she has the chance to stare them out.
The Super Extra Convenience Mart isn’t far, so she tries to change her mood. She knows she’s got to be calm and collected when she enters the mart because that’s when she wins.
Ever since 1997, she’s revered the whole ambience of The Super Extra Convenience Mart. It’s become the one place in her entire world where she can feel warm enough to strike up any kind of conversation with any one. Sheila never talks about scratchcards or recalls her huge win all those moons ago. She likes to chat about the more everyday topics in the community.
As she enters the mart, she inhales the unmistakable stench of kids’ farts and confectionery as if it was holy incense and makes her way to the counter.
‘Such a shame about that little boy, isn’t it?’ she says, scratching away quietly at her left cheek, curling her lip up at the corner to show the angst.
‘Which kid’s that then, luvvy?’ says the lady in mid-scratch to right calf, under the counter.
‘Oh, you must know about it, surely. Little boy of eight? Locked up by his parents since the age of one? Fed baked beans on toast and nothing else?’
‘Oh no. Didn’t see that one,’ says the lady as she secretly feels for the scratchcards to the left of her and starts counting out Sheila’s quota.
‘Oh, it was in The Mail. Apparently, he never went out in his life. Killed himself by wolfing down his toys. Choked to death, the poor git.’
‘Ooh,’ says the lady, having counted out the five Lucky Stripes. ‘Yes, I think I did hear about that somewhere. The Mail, was it?’ As if she cared.
‘Oh yeah. Mirror picked it up later on but it was The Mail that brought it out first. Terrible, isn’t it? I mean, what is the world coming to when that’s going on, hey?’
A silence full of spiritual sickness reigns as the lady waits for Sheila to announce her order. Sheila coughs up some phlegm, and, as she swallows it back down, asks for the cards.
‘I’ll have five times Lucky Stripes, three One-In-Fours and,’- this is when she makes a theatrical stab at a flutter- ‘Oh, go on then! I’ll try my luck with Make-A-Mint.’
The lady looks up at her for an amount, fingers tight up against the thick roll of Make-A-Mints.
‘I’ll have four of those, please.’
‘New roll, this. No one won anything off that last roll,’ says the lady.
Sheila is suitably impressed. ‘Never know when he’s going to shine down, do you?’ she says, coughing up some more phlegm now she’s got the taste for it. She chews on it with her twenty pound note at the ready as the lady tots up the items and passes them over the counter.
She leaves in the usual way, stopping at the magazine section, dipping into Company, flicking a few pages, only to flick back to the front page, see the price and replace it with a stout sniff. She only does this in the useless hope that the lady might be swayed from thinking she has a scratchcard problem, as if she cared.
On the way to the cafeteria at Sainsbury’s, she sees the same two young ladies walking towards her, now fresh from a quickie-facial. Head down, she sweeps past like a ghost. They don’t even see her.
At the cafeteria, she orders her half-price full English breakfast, sits down with The Mail, gets out the Royals, the lighter and the lucky two pence piece. Only when everything is set out on the table to the best of her abilities does she bring out the cards.
With The Mail at pages two and three (the £250 was won using this technique), the ritual commences.
Tongue out slightly, and with fingers at the ready, the scratching begins.
She has to take it easy on them. She doesn’t want to do the lot in a second. It’s of great importance to be patient and wait for the right card to call out to her.
Lighting a Royal with the advent of a Make-A-Mint, she tugs hard and places it to smoulder temptingly in the ashtray. This is Sheila’s religion. This is what Sheila lives by. It’s her defining moment, and it cannot be bettered.
On the third Make-A-Mint, she decides to take another measured tug on the Royal, looks down at the card as she holds in the smoke, believes in the card, exhales the smoke and with new vigour reaches for the coin and starts to scratch. Her action is much more fluent. She’s willing a winner with the love of scratching. Scratching is a craft. Scratching is beauty.
It was on her third card that the £250 had been won back in 1997.
‘Fuck it,’ she says, pulling out a sausage dripping in baked bean sauce from the plate. Scoffing it down, she swipes at her tea and takes down a few shovels of beans before whipping two slices of bacon into a bread roll with an egg, repeating the words; ‘Fuck it Fuck it Fuck it,’ with her mouth wide open.
No winning sequence has ever worked twice for her, but from somewhere deep inside, Sheila believes that the big one will come. She’ll be in the papers, just like all the other winners.
She stares into space and huffs. It’s a huff full of resolution, though. She wants to win.
Switching to the Lucky Stripes, she whimsically scratches at all five of them in quick succession, playing out the game of half-hearted nonchalance that won her that free coach-trip to EuroDisney she sold in Loot last October for £43.
As she looks down at the winlines, her mind can take no more. Swinging from the tightrope of resentful acceptance, looking down on the safety net of complete alienation, her eyes turn to marble.
It’s got to be a conspiracy against me, she thinks. The lady at the mart must have slipped me one bumper scratchcard to turn her into an addict and now they were all duds.
Pulling hard on the tail-end of a Royal, Sheila’s complexion changes. She’s redder. Her whole body has puffed up in a contained rage. Her skin looks like one pin-prick away from floods of fluid. Gambling appears now to be a physical and mental addiction. She puts out the Royal as if it were on the face of the entire world. She hates the world more than herself, but soon, she’ll be left to face Sheila, alone in the world, too terrified of death to kill herself, and too broken to pick up the pieces of her life. Why her?
The remaining scratchcards are taken out at speed. With each dud card, she flicks over a page of the Daily Mail. On page eleven, a headline catches her attention.
‘New Las Vegas-style gaming laws set to sweep across Britain.’
Sheila can’t quite see it. ‘It’s gambling, you stupid cunt, not gaming. What’s bloody gaming, for fuck’s sake. Sounds like a Chinese woofta. Fuckin’ Yankee bastards.’
On pages fourteen and fifteen, there’s an investigation into gambling called ‘One born every day.’ There’s the story of the famous QC who suffered sleepless nights nursing bourbon over a roulette wheel, the teenage tearaway who stole and dealt skunk to thirteen-year olds to feed his desire to plug fruit-machines. She got as far as the story of the middle-aged woman who fell to her death on the tracks of a tube-station after blowing her wages on scratchcards. She quickly slid her vision over to the far end of the opposite page, where an advert for a stairlift had a beaming old biddy with her thumbs up halfway to heaven.
The scattered scratchcards look pointless for a moment, there on the table. She tries to tidy them up but a sharp pain registers in her right hand. It tells her that she’ll get cramp if she carries on clearing the cards, so she picks herself up from the table, looking back just the once to remind herself of what she’s left behind, what she must never do again in her life.
Next stop is the Coral betting-shop where her ex-husband works.
He works there to keep away from gambling. It’s works for him.
‘Lose then, did ya?’ asks Reggie, as usual.
Sheila goes for a quick scratch at her nose and then sniffs with vim, bringing up an exotic amalgam of phlegm.
‘Course I fuckin’ lost, ya cunt,’ she says, swallowing down the sliced morsels. ‘They’re all rigged anyway. They give you a couple of winners, get you fuckin’ hooked and then print fuckin’ losers, the bastards.’
She has nothing to add, unless she wants to have a go at him.
Reggie turns away carefully, pretending to look at some odds on the blackboard. ‘One born every day,’ he says to himself. It’s too painful to watch, too overwhelming to cure, too easy to ignore.
As he turns around again to face her, Sheila turns to play the fruit-machine to her right.
‘Never know,’ he hears her say as she digs into her purse for quid coins.
As the machine comes to life, Sheila’s whole shape relaxes.
Then comes a feature. ‘Here, Reggie! What’s this?’ she scowls, pointing at the machine. She never could work these things out. They’re just a quick means to a premature end, a way to restore her to poverty so that she could moan about how she never does anything.
‘Press the top button if you think it’ll be an odd number and the bottom button if you think it’ll be even,’ says Reggie.
Sheila plums for the top button. It’s odd. ‘I won! What shall I do now?’
‘You can carry on or press collect,’ says Reggie.
Sheila scrapes the side of her face with her nails for a short while. She can feel the power of the machine willing her on to gamble. She’s sure she’ll lose, but she can’t resist trying to beat it. ‘Oh, what the hell,’ she says playfully, pressing the bottom button.
‘One is odd. You lose,’ says the green digital read-out on the machine.
‘Fuckin’ typical,’ she cries.
Without saying goodbye, Sheila makes the lonesome walk towards the door. Reggie knows not to say anything.
Next day, Sheila wakes up to a loud, monotonous knock on the door.
‘Alright! Alright! Keep your hair on!’ she screeches, adjusting her greasy mop of hair to a side-parting as she bounds across the wine-stained array of rugs, mats and carpet cut-offs towards the front door.
‘Who is it?’ she scowls.
‘Recorded delivery for Sheila Doddles?’ He sounds Australian. She likes Australians because they’re generally very easy to bed.
She opens the door and takes a quick peek at the man’s face. He’s big and stocky, late-twenties maybe. Sheila looks down at the package in his hand.
‘What is it, then?’ she asks, surprised. The only time she received recorded delivery was when the council sent a warning of eviction for failure to pay the rent.
‘It’s a free gift from Life’s Winners? The scratchcard people?’
The moment he says the magic word, Sheila reaches out for the package and slams the door in his face. Grating her inner thigh with one hand, she shimmies through to the kitchen.
Safely installed at her lucky chair, she rips open the package to reveal a taped-up box with a sticker of a Make-A-Mint scratchcard on it.
‘What the fuck is this?’ she gasps, lifting it up to shake it. ‘It can’t be.’
Sheila runs over with the box to the cutlery drawer and pulls out a long meat-knife. She forgets how blunt it is. She’s stabbing at it, now she’s trying to slice it open, and then she sees the scissors, glistening on the sideboard. Again, she stabs, but this time she makes a perforation, so she sits down again and manages to slide the scissors’ edge down and into the lining of the box.
‘I don’t fuckin’ believe it! Yes!’ There in the box lay a mountain of scratchcards. She’s shaking. It’s all too much. Why her?
Scraping off the letter attached to the package, she takes it and wobbles over to the kettle to flick it on.
‘In celebration of the new tax-free gaming laws in Britain, Life’s Winners would like you to accept this free bundle of assorted Life’s Winners scratchcards with our compliments,’ she reads, hardly believing her eyes.
‘Right,’ she says, armed with a Royal, a cup of tea and her lucky two-pence piece, ready to devour the cards in front of her.
Two hours later, she’s won £31. After a recount, another £3 is discovered on a Make-A-Mint. Sheila’s happy, though. She feels a warmth that embraces her every sense, an energy so strong it has worn her out.
She goes for a scratch on her arse. It’s a long, hard scratch. She deserves it.
That afternoon, Sheila decides to make the pilgrimage to The Super Extra Convenience Mart, almost as if it was just another day. She cashes in the scratchcards and buys ten Make-A-Mints, five Lucky Stripes and five One-In-Fours. As always, she brings up the phlegm right on time, scratches her cheek and flicks through Company on her way out.